CHILD OF FORTUNE

Chapter 19

We both stood there for a long silent moment, beholding the celestial city on the hill, for the dense profusion of great flowers seemed to grow in organized groves, color by color, form by form, so that the huge garden seemed for all the world to be divided up into arrondissements, like a true city of men.

Indeed, I was put in mind of my first sight of Great Edoku seen from space, for while the Perfumed Garden was bathed all over by the same bright afternoon sunlight, the districts thereof were a mosaic of brilliantly contrasting facets of color, so that the whole took on the aspect of an impossible gem shimmering in all the hues of the rainbow, a vision of breathtakingly chaotic color, in which, nevertheless, an elusive order seemed to be implied. just below the level of conscious apprehension.

As for Bloomenkinder, while these could hardly have been individually visible from this far vantage, their presence seemed to reveal itself in a seething motion overlaid on the vision, a wavering of the whole image like that of an overcomplicated mandala one has stared at in a toxicated state for too long.

So too could I hear the collective human mantra of the unseen and yet seen denizens thereof, for the air hummed with a faint celestial vibration, an ethereal wordless song emanating from unknown hundreds of distant human voices all harmonizing on the same single note, a note which sent my spirit soaring, a siren Om of paradise, which had my feet inching forward, and my hands beginning to move toward my mask.

Guy stood there beside me with his head bent back, and his nose in the air, and a beatific smile beaming from his face, and his eyes squeezed shut to better savor the perfumes, like a small boy inhaling the aroma of the most wonderful bakery .

Alors, if my spirit had all but been captured from afar by sight and sound alone, what must he be feeling now?

"Guy ...? Guy ...? Talk to me, Guy, tell me what it is that you smell on the wind!"

His eyelids peeled open, and he half-turned his head to face me. But his eyes seemed as clear and vacant as those of a Bloomenkind, and his nostrils continued to flare around long, deep draughts of perfumed air.

"The Perfumed Garden ..." said that eerie dybbuk voice. "My Perfumed Garden," said Guy Vlad Boca, albeit in a voice that seemed to speak as an echo, as a memory he had already let go, dopplering away to extinction down the corridors of time. Logic should have filled me with terror, but Guy had taken my hand in his, and his voice, in perfect tonal harmony with the distant hum of the Perfumed Garden's mantra, insisted that there was nothing here for us to fear, that we were only going home.

"Come ... come ... come home ..." Guy chanted, as if he, or some forest spirit, or vraiment both, had read my thoughts, or indeed as if his thoughts, and mine, and the voice of that spirit, were but notes of the same transcendent mantric chord.

And then without further rational thought, I found myself bounding hand in hand with Guy in great leaps toward the Perfumed Garden, like moths to a flame, like motes of dust rising up a great shaft of golden light to greet the sun.

***

Nor did we pause for a moment until we stood as groundling insects at the base of that mighty floral metropolis.

Groves and hedges of brilliantly colored flowers rose up the gentle slope of the great treecrown before me to fill the world. And I beheld multitudes of my own kind buzzing and dancing about them like an ecstatic swarm of bees on a midsummer's mother lode of floral beneficence.

A vast multitude of Bloomenkinder, a golden citizenry of naked and physically splendid humans, enlivened the avenues and groves of this city of the flowers with their recomplicated and utterly graceful pavane. They dined at great floral banquets, they slumbered in municipal parks, they engaged in arcane civic activity impossible to fathom at this remove, they sauntered in streams along the avenues between the flowers like gay boulevardiers, and all with a choreographed perfection of motion and timing which would have done any maestro of the dance proud.

But while the resemblance to the buzzings and scurryings of bees was given the lie by the way the Bloomenkinder made art of every motion with all the style and grace appropriate to our mammalian species and then some, when it came to the collective mantra of a beehive, the metaphor was far closer to the sensual and spiritual reality.

For the mighty wordless human song that filled the world, like the buzzing of a million bees, was indeed a collective mantric chorus that vibrated to the spiritual and genetic wavelength of its own species. Mayhap this soul-stirring thrum of human joy might have been a mere drone of monotony to an apiary ear, just as in the buzz of the bees we hear nothing but the dead hiss of insectoid static. But just as the buzzing bees must hear the song of their spirit in the voices of their fellows, so did this mighty mantra of the collective human spirit draw my singularity toward union with the chorus of the whole.

Indeed I found myself humming that mantra under my breath from somewhere deep in the depths of my throat, and it seemed as if my very bones were vibrating to its harmony, and I became aware that Guy was singing it as well, his mouth wide open in a radiant smile, the sound pouring  up through him in a single mighty tone, that selfsame tone which had resonated in the voice which had first spoken through him the day before, and which now seemed to speak to my own soul.

"Ah ... ah ... ah ... om ... ah ... ah ... ah ... home ..."

I turned to Guy with my own blissful smile. Slowly, his face turned itself toward me, so that I could see upon it the mirror of my own joy. I squeezed his hand. "Oh Guy, " I said softly, "I just didn't know ..."

Guy seemed to look into my eyes for a long moment, and it seemed as if several spirits were regarding me from the endless depths of his. The gay Child of Fortune whose wit had won me on the streets of Great Edoku, the Merchant Prince who had lavishly rescued me from penury, the deeper and darker Guy who had emerged psychotropically on the Unicorn Garden, the nascent Charge Addict, the obsessed and intrepid psychonaut of the Bloomenveldt, the creature who had made love to me last night in the forest, they were all there behind his eyes, they were all at peace with each other, they were all one, and in that moment, vraiment, did I find it in my heart to love them all.

And so hand in hand, two hearts beating as one, two spirits humming the same glorious mantra, or so at the time it seemed, did two no longer lost children of man enter their Perfumed Garden.

**

We walked in dazzlement down the aisles of great flowers, through a living kaleidoscope of brilliant colors and achingly lovely pastel shadows, for the very air within the Perfumed Garden was suffused and romanced by the bright sunlight streaming through thousands upon thousands of translucent petals, and at first I could only bathe myself in the rainbow radiance and laugh in delight.

But soon enough I perceived that we promenaded among throngs of stately Bloomenkinder like grimy ducklings among serene and impassive snow-white swans gliding in a recomplicated pavane about the surface of an untrammeled pond. Everywhere I looked, I saw perfected exemplars of my own species moving with the balletic fluidity of creatures whose movements are governed entirely by the natural imperatives of the laws of motion, following their destined trajectories with innocently perfect grace.

Was not Guy the wiser spirit after all? For was not my every sense filled with overwhelming beauty save that which tasted the air? And if I dared doff my mask and partake of that deepest communion, might I not too learn that here I had found my perfect flower? Of what use were struggle and travail and sapient dissatisfaction when with but a sigh of surrender one might transcend the maya thereof to a garden of perfect bliss?

Vraiment, mayhap I would have torn off my mask to inhale the timeless perfume of floral paradise without further moral struggle in the throes of this blissful satori, had I not then felt the insistent tug of Guy's hand in mine, and come out of my reverie to realize that he was already leading me toward a grove of blue and green speckled flowers.

Here a veritable horde of Bloomenkinder was consuming the yellow fruit, half again as large as a human head, which grew in profusion about the stalks. This they accomplished by deftly splitting the soft spheres in half with the sides of their hands and scooping the purple gelatinous pulp into their mouths with their cupped fingers. Without a word or a sign, Guy let go my hand and marched straight to the banquet of huge messy fruit.

He sank to his haunches forthwith and set to work in the manner of the surrounding swarm, with all their avidity for the luscious purple slime, but with little of their genetically perfected precision. When he struck the huge fruit to cleave it open, he mashed it into a disaster. The gelatinous pulp dribbled and spurted from his fingers as he then sought to shovel the remains into his mouth with both hands, and he seemed utterly indifferent to the fact that he was plastering the vile-looking purple goo all over his face and into the crown of his hair in the process. From both the esthetic and psychic viewpoints. it was truly a jolting and revolting spectacle.

Certainement it was more than enough to dissuade me from any temptation to breathe the seductive aroma of this vile succulence and be constrained to emulate the same thereby!

I hunkered down beside him and fairly shouted in his ear. "Guy! Guy! You're fressing like a swine! You're gobbling goo like a demented animal!"

He did not so much as raise his eyes from his fruit to acknowledge my existence and continued to scoop dripping handfuls of pulp into his slobbering mouth without even breaking rhythm, spattering me with gobbets of same in the process.

"Merde!" I snarled. "This is more than I can countenance!" I kicked the dripping mess of fruit from his hands. This at last penetrated the sphere of his attention. He slowly turned his head to peruse the source of this disturbance with vacantly blissful eyes, then turned away again, smashed open the nearest yellow fruit, and returned to his feeding ritual.

"Guy! Guy!" I shouted. "It's Sunshine! Don't you know me? Don't you even know I'm here?"

At this, he paused in his devouring devotions, and for a moment it seemed as if he were indeed aware of my presence, for as his head slowly looked upward from his meal, and he let the fruit fall from his fingers, it seemed for an augenblick that he was responding to my words. But no, alas, his eyes looked straight past me, and his nose went high in the air, and he arose to follow it without looking back.

***

Only now, unwilling as I yet was to essay the use of force, and constrained thereby to trail after a Guy who utterly ignored me on his grand tour of the Perfumed Garden, did the generality of perfection begin to resolve itself into some inspection of detail which hinted at the unseen Serpent therein.

Dozens of different species of flowers offered up a bewildering variety of fruits, pollens and nectars, not at isolated kiosks, but in whole groves thronged with avid Bloomenkinder gobbling up the produce like flocks of birds descending upon orchards.

Whole precincts of flowers were given over to slumber. Great naked shoals of Bloomenkinder lay sprawled all over the acres of velveteen petals provided, dreaming I knew not what in the bright clear light of day, and appearing for all the world like the exhausted yet tranquil morning after some mighty communal orgy.

And then Guy's trajectory chanced to bring us past the nursery.

Here clusters of human infants hung from the vegetal teats of a huge stand of rainbow-hued puffballs like so many berries, and others crawled about their leafy playpen within a ring of silent female Bloomenkinder who moved only when necessary to keep the toddlers from straying.

While a single Bloomenkind lay supine and utterly silent on a leaf near the edge of the grove in the act of giving birth.

She seemed entranced into a semiconscious state of dreamy ecstasy, wherein her protoplasmic mechanisms were nevertheless performing their functions in an exemplary manner that would have done the best of Healers proud. Her breaths were deep and regular in the approved rhythm and every muscle in her body was perfectly attuned to maximize the efficacy of her contractions. When after a short and entirely silent labor, the infant emerged, the mother started its breath with her own, bit off the umbilical cord at the navel, methodically licked the baby clean, and then straightway affixed its tiny mouth to the nearest free floral nipple. She then began to devour the afterbirth, a process which at last forced me to avert my eyes.

Now I truly beheld the Serpent lurking in the Garden, the price one paid for hearkening to its sweet promises of symbiotic perfection.

For if this was a paradise designed for man by the flowers, it was a version crafted by the indifferent, cold hand of the Bloomenveldt, not the warm-blooded mammalian spirit, which is to say it was a floral vision of the perfected pollinator known elsewhere to himself as man.

Not even the love of a mother for her newborn babe was permitted to mar this floral vision of paradise, for from the point of view of the flowers, the highest form of pollinator society, naturellement, was not a perfect commonwealth of sapiently enlightened human hearts, but the pheromonically predictable perfection of a human hive.

"Merde, Guy, we must quit this place forthwith!" I shouted, and once more I was tantalized by the illusion that I had reached what was left of the natural man, for, without demur, he took a deep breath, smiled at me in blissful harmony, and straightaway seemed to march off on a purposeful new vector.

But rather than the nearest egress from this vile venue, he made straight for an extensive orchard of tall blue flowers, where whole congregations of Bloomenkinder sat, each to their own flower, like a great swarm of buddhas in a forest of bo trees. There they sat like idols, staring fixedly up into the cerulean void, and chanting the booming mantra that was both the incarnated voice of the Bloomenveldt manifested in human throats and the Bloomenkinder's paean of homage to the perfect and mindless spirit thereof.

Certainement this song which called to the very protoplasm from which my psyche arose was the most horrid floral simulacrum of all, for this noble mantra of the human spirit was now revealed as no more than the chorus of the genes, no more than the empty-minded buzzing of mammalian bees.

And Guy Vlad Boca let fall my hand, in thrall to that Bloomenkinder chorus, gracefully seating himself in the lotus position under the nearest unoccupied flower and proceeding to gaze into the clear blue nothingness of the Bloomenveldt sky as he merged his lonely and precious singularity into the nirvanic voice of the All.

At the time, I could imagine no more terminal straits than this, I had no further belief that any unaided words of mine could summon his sapience forth. I had no further recourse but to main force, and certainement this was no time to eschew the most puissant power at my command.

Which is to say the only possible path to the spirit within this beatified corpus was via the route of the natural man. I therefore activated the Touch and applied it where it was likely to do the most good.

When it came to the flesh, the art of Leonardo produced the limpest of results, for no doubt the hormonal matrix of erotic interest must exist before the kundalinic serpent can be aroused to uncoil via electronic stimulation of the software of manhood.

But if pheromonic imperatives controlled the biochemistry of his brain to the point where tantric arousal was out of the question, the nerve trunk that led from the phallus to the centers of most primal awareness was at least still connected to what was left of the elan humain of Guy Vlad Boca.

Which is to say that, while that which I grasped remained flaccid, Guy's face began to surface the evidence of some ambiguity between chemical and electronic stimuli as he regarded me now. His eyes struggled toward recognition. His lips began to move tentatively around the single mantric syllable they were mouthing.

"Yes, Guy, yes, say something, say something," I fairly begged, tugging imploringly at his phallus, "tell me at least that you are still there."

And then as he sat there motionless among all those Bloomenkinder bodhis. his head turned almost imperceptibly, and he seemed to be smiling straight at me, and his eyes met mine, and his mouth fashioned that continuous stream of monotone arising through it into the single word that could allow in that moment the singular sprach of Guy Vlad Boca to speak from within the mantric Lingo of the eternal empty All.

"Ah ... ah ... ah ... amused."

I all but burst into tears to hear this, tears of both sorrow and fond remembrance, for here I beheld both my lover and my lost comrade, the gay spirit I had met on the streets of Edoku and the psychotropically-obsessed creature of Ciudad Pallas, the mystic libertine and the Bloomenkind he had become, at the end point of the vector all those avatars had been so avidly pursuing, speaking to me in the voice of the forest of the final joy that now filled his heart --

Yet the tears came not, for at least I had roused some poor semblance of the natural man, mayhap all was not yet lost.

"What amuses you, Guy?" I said, cooing softly in his ear, kneading his flaccid lingam in a pulsing rhythm, as if to pump cleansing kundalinic energies up from the deepest root of his manhood to do battle with the chemical minions of the Bloomenveldt spirit investing his brain.

His eyes gazed directly into mine now, and there was no mistaking that someone or something knew that I was there. Vraiment I could feel some vague stirrings in his phallus now, as if the manly serpent were beginning to uncoil in its sleep.

"I ... we ... amused ..." he said in a quavering voice, as if more than one animating spirit were attempting to use the same lips.

"Speak to me, Guy Vlad Boca," I demanded softly, redoubling my electronically-enhanced ministrations. "Let the natural man once more arise."

"Sunshine ..." he said quite clearly. "My mystic libertine ... sip steadily at it as you gambol through your perfect flower ..."

"Guy, Guy, it is you!" I cried.

"Never before or since have I known such perfect bliss ... Seek the Perfumed Garden ... Let the mountain come to thee Mohammed ..."

Was it indeed no more than fragmented memory speaking? Certainement, his phallus began to slowly fill with the life juices of manhood, certainement, he had given over his mantric chanting, certainement, our eyes were locked in unwavering rapport, which is to say that whatever now spoke through those random syllables, be it a true lover waving his last goodbye or a dybbuk of the Enchanted Forest, tell me not that it did not speak for me.

"Guy, listen to me, Guy, come with me," I said as seductively as I could under the circumstances, drawing him slowly and gently to his feet by the handle of his manhood. Vraiment, I met with anything but resistance, for his eyes gazed into mine with a meaning whose frank intent would seem to be made quite firmly plain by his now quite thoroughly aroused lingam.

Mayhap I could lead him from the Perfumed Garden by this lever, for certainly it would not be the first time masculine obstinacy had been overcome in this manner. And once I had gotten him to a leafy venue well away from floral influences, mayhap the natural union of lingam and yoni would bring the natural man to his senses.

"Ah ... ah ... ah ... amuse ..." he moaned in a deep hollow voice, at once the Bloomenveldt's floral mantra and the frankest profession of entirely mammalian joy, for his eyes closed in ecstasy, and his lungs inhaled in long priapic pants, and he moved his throbbing phallus back and forth in an unmistakable rhythm within the embrace of my hand.

"Oh yes, Guy," I babbled rapidly, "let us quit this place for a secluded venue and we will show each other the amusements proper to a natural man and woman and then some, this I promise you ..."

Und so weiter, just to keep his ears filled constantly with the sound of human Lingo, as I managed to lead him in this obscene manner from the greater obscenity of the mantric grove.

But once we had cleared the immediate pheromonic influences thereof and entered the dance of the Bloomenkinder down the floral avenue, Guy, or that to which his spirit moved, sought out his own vector, breathing in great silent draughts of perfumed air now, rolling his eyes in ecstasy, and now it was I who was constrained to follow the course set by his lingam, which all but threatened to writhe like an impatient serpent out of my hand.

Since in truth I had no idea where I was at the time, one direction would be as efficacious as any other, so if Guy wished to lead me to a boudoir of his own choosing, I could see nothing for it but to follow the path of least resistance. Vraiment, when I let Guy proceed along his chosen path, he readily enough allowed me to clasp an arm around his waist in proper loverly style the better to keep hold of his lingam, and my female sensibility did not exactly have to be tuned to a fever pitch to know it had hold of the natural man.

"Where are we going, Guy? And what do you intend to do when we get there?" I asked him, summoning up an incongruous air of erotic playfulness with a mighty act of will.

He paused, he turned to me, he favored me with a smile of blindingly radiant lust. And then his hand found my yoni, fondling it with a frank avidity that set my heart and hopes soaring, and I let go of his lingam so that I might throw both arms around his neck and plant a joyous kiss on his lips.

But Guy, forcefully eschewing this attempt at loverly embrace, brushed my arms aside, and, gazing fixedly over my shoulder, pulled me to him, and attempted to thrust his lingam into my yoni through the intervening cloth.

I whirled myself out of this animalistic embrace, and then it was that I saw that without my knowing it, we had reached the venue of his intent.

The Perfumed Garden path which we had been following had debouched into a grotesque floral amphitheater where low mounded Bloomenveldt hillsides almost entirely surrounded a vast central grove. And around the hillsides grew bed after bed of tan blue flowers. Under the flowers, swarm after swarm of Bloomenkinder bodhis sat, humming the eternal booming mantra of the Enchanted Forest, hundreds upon hundreds of mammalian bees in a nirvanic paean of glory to the blissful nothingness of the hive.

The flowers of the vast central grove were the rosy pink color of a lover's naked body by firelight, and their fat velvety petals lolled out on the surrounding leaves like a carpet of tongues.

Upon these fleshy cushions a vast seraglio of copulations was taking place, hundreds of interlocked bodies coupled and recoupled in tantric figures of such lithe sinuosity and perfect ecstatic abandon as to have put a temple frieze of fabled Hind to shame. It was almost more than the eye could credit or the ear comprehend. Yonis, lingams, indeed every conceivable erotic orifice and protuberance, united and recombined in a vast and sinuous collective motion, spurred on in their extravagant copulations by continuous sighing breakers of orgasm cresting and rising on the surface of the fleshly sea.

But rather than stirring my passions, such a spectacle doused my kundalinic fires with an icy hand round my heart.

Certainement, as a tantric tableau, there was nothing lacking in the way of artistic perfection. Each and every performer was a paragon of the human body's form, and the recomplicated figures were done with a flawless grace and egoless sincerity beyond that which even after years of study perfect masters of the art attain,

But I would have been more aroused by the sight of the breeding season in a primate preserve. For at least at a primate preserve I would have been observing creatures copulating in the style appropriate to their kind. Here, au contraire, I beheld the intimate communion of the tantra reduced to mindless tropism. Here were my ears filled with the buzz of the human hive melded in solipsistic harmony with the moans and sighs of an eternal tantric cusp.

Thus might it have been in our ancestral Eden, but so too will it become should sapience expire from our far-flung worlds, leaving only the indifferent nothingness from whence we came behind to sing its empty and triumphant song.

But Guy Vlad Boca had long since become incapable of such distinctions between form and spirit, between pheromonic imperatives and the human heart. He was flinging off his pack and tearing off his clothing, ripping the straps of his filter mask from around his neck and tossing his last sapient hope aside, and then he was upon me, thrusting his insistent lingam against my yoni, attempting to breach my citadel and prod me with it toward the venue of pheromonic rut at the same time.

I pushed him away with a mighty shove, he stumbled a few steps backward, and then righted himself, at which point he paid me no further heed, dashing around me as if I were a natural obstacle, and flinging himself into the midst of the breeding ground.

Whereupon he forthwith seized up the nearest female in his embrace, who avidly impaled herself on his throbbing phallus, even as another impaled her from the rear, and then he was tumbling and rolling away from me into the vile melee, lending his own voice to the moans and the cries, enveloped in an arabesque sinuosity of torsos and limbs.

Needless to say, this was more than any fear or rational consideration could constrain me to condone! Snarling with outrage, I reached out for Guy with my hand of Touch, and succeeded in grabbing the nether root of his lingam, seeking to remove it from the Bloomenkinde's yoni and Guy from his madness.

But instead of yanking Guy back into human reality by his manhood as I had intended, I only succeeded in sending a shockwave of tantric amplification heterodyning across the cross- connected erotic figure. Ecstatic cries rose into a shrill and insistent chorus, and bodies writhed and spasmed in spreading chain-reactions of orgasm. And dozens of hands were dragging me deeper into the fray. I stumbled and fell, and Guy was torn from my grasp, and I was battered and pulled this way and that, while phalluses prodded at every part of my body, and it took all of my strength just to keep from being drawn under by a riptide of flesh.

I lost sight of Guy entirely, indeed all thought of him left my mind as, in the midst of this rape most foul, I struck out in rage and terror, attempting for the first time if without much skill in the martial art thereof to use the Touch as a weapon.

I had never before been in a physical conflict in my life, and now I found myself fighting off a riotous obscenity of mass sexual overload which I myself had unknowingly triggered. But for every blow that I managed to land in the region of a painful plexus, another always seemed to strike a tantric chakra, so that all my efforts to defend myself further exacerbated the endless legions of my attackers.

Then I felt my pack being torn from my back, and hands at my floatbelt, and fearing that this would go next, I did the only thing I could, turned it up to .19 lift, and attempted to free myself from my tormenters long enough to leap clear.

I succeeded in jumping clear of the ground, but my upward progress was impeded in midair by the press of bodies and the scrabblings of hands.

Then I felt myself being drawn back, down into the mire of bodies, and fingers were tearing randomly at my filter mask, and suddenly it was ripped away, and phalluses thrust forward from every direction toward every orifice, and I felt myself reaching for them with my hands and my yoni and my mouth as a knee-shaking tsunami of blind animal lust surged through my body --

As I felt my consciousness subliming into a blood-red mist of egoless libido, I had the last combat- torn and adrenaline-charged presence of mind to perform two valedictory acts of sapience before I passed over to the flowers.

I exhaled from the bottom of my lungs, and then stopped my breathing.

I struck out with vicious and electronically augmented karate blows, and kicked off some unknown portion of some unseen body with both of my feet.

As I soared free of the melee, something hit me in the stomach with wind-killing force, and I was constrained to suck in a great charge of pheromone-saturated air, and then something else smashed into my temple as I broke clear -- and I had one last moment of roaring red consciousness, scrabbling to reach the lingams and bodies receding beneath my ravenous grasp before even that lapsed into darkness.

Chapter 20

I awoke to the gentlest of thumps as I floated down supinely onto a leaf, nudged back the last increment into consciousness by this most tender breaking of a most languid fall. The Perfumed Garden was nowhere in evidence, which is to say that my eyes opened and focused on naught but the endless flower-strewn green plain of the Bloomenveldt, nor had I chanced to descend near a Bloomenkinder village or even within the overpowering chemical aura of any flower.

Bonne chance indeed! Now I remembered leaping upward with my floatbelt turned up to .1 g, thrust out of a vile unspeakability whose details I was not ready to call up from beyond the veil of my present dreamy vagueness. There had been a wonderful surge of roaring lust, and a blow on the head ...

Slowly, my consciousness firmed up to the point where I began to understand what must have happened.

I had been rendered unconscious as the gentle lift of the floatbelt bore me aloft, and I must have drifted up higher and higher until the floatbelt's safety mechanism had automatically turned down the lift to prevent me from drifting up beyond the life-sustaining level of Belshazaar's atmosphere and then deposited me randomly on this leaf.

I must therefore have risen quite far, through several atmospheric streams, which must have blown me this way and that for unknowable distances, which is to say I had been thoroughly shaken by the cupped hands of fate and then tossed like a die back onto the gaming board of life.

And then I began to perceive that while the Perfumed Garden was nowhere in sight, it could not be said that its influence was completely absent from my sensorium. For as my memory regained the clarity of my restored vision, I remembered the frenzied tangle of naked limbs and torsos, the forest of clutching and groping hands, the thrusting clusters of phalluses, with a sad and longing nostalgia, knowing I had been an utter fool to abandon such an eternal ecstasy of perfect sexual delight.

Yet at the same time, higher portions of my mind remembered all too well that the real-time emotions encoded with these experiences had been those of outraged disgust and terrified anger.

Out of this disjunction between the true memory of the event and my present perception of same through a rosy haze of diffuse sexual arousal, arose yet a third aspect of my immediate consciousness, namely a detached observer who could readily comprehend that the difference must be the result of something borne on the wind.

Vraiment, as I sat up and began to size up the full extent of my dilemma, I knew that I could easily enough find my way back to paradise by surrendering my spirit to the rosy waves of this lustful tide, which, though fainter than the night breeze wafting the aroma of the Bittersweet Jungle down to the porch of my parents' manse in Nouvelle Orlean, would surely nevertheless carry a soul cast into its gentle undertow back home to floral nirvana.

As I fought against this dreamy desire, my awareness was sharpened by the adrenal surge of the struggle, and I began to fully comprehend the peril, not to say hopelessness, of my position.

My filter mask was gone and so was my pack. I had supplies of neither food nor water. I had lost my homing beacon. I was at an unknown locus deep in the interior of the Bloomenveldt, hundreds, or for all I knew, thousands of kilometers from the coast, at any rate a journey of weeks even at maximum speed along an unerringly perfect vector.

But in comparison to the peril that faced my spirit, the physical magnitude of such a trek faded into insignificance, for in order to survive, let alone escape from the land of the Bloomenkinder, I had no choice but to eat of the fruits and nectars and pollens of the Bloomenveldt, for no other sustenance was available. I would have sold my soul for a sack of fressen bars, for that might very well be the price extracted for the gustatory largesse of the flowers.

Worse still, unimaginably worse, I would have to journey for weeks across the Bloomenveldt with my lungs and my spirit naked to every pheromonic tropism wafted my way on its perfumed breezes.

Nor did my moral senses provide an unambiguous direction, for did not love and honor demand that I make all possible efforts to rescue Guy? Could I fairly call myself human if I fled to save my own spirit and left a fellow sapient being in mindless thrall to floral fascism?

Besides, would it not be easier and infinitely more pleasant, since surrender to the Bloomenveldt was in any case inevitable, to do so by returning to the Perfumed Garden and at least live in mindless bliss with my lover rather than as a lone lost Bloomenkind of the forest ...?

But I knew full well from whence this thought arose, and not even the perfumed whispers of the Bloomenveldt could persuade me that I had any hope of extracting Guy from its bosom unaided.

I had only two real choices, both of them bleak. I could make for the coast by myself or I could return to the Perfumed Garden and attempt to rescue Guy. In the latter case, I would expend my last moments of sapient consciousness in a futile attempt to do the impossible; and the last thing I would know would be my joyous surrender to the enemy of my spirit. In the former case, on the other hand, would I not meet the same end? For no one had ever returned to the worlds of men from the land of the true Bloomenkinder, and no one was in a better position to appreciate why than myself.

As I pondered this perfect synergy of pragmatic impasse and moral dilemma, the sun had sunk far past the zenith, and the light was subtly deepening to golden, and the shadows of nearby flowers and distant hillocks of foliage were definitely pointing the way to the west, to the sunset to which the beautiful and empty faces of unknown thousands of Bloomenkinder would soon be turning in vegetative homage.

Somehow vision perceived in this clearly polarized afternoon landscape what logic and morality could not. I could, like the Bloomenkinder, turn my face to the sunset of the spirit, or I could, like the true Child of Fortune, follow the rising sun into the sapient perils of the unknown future.

The choice was as clear as the difference between karma and destiny. Guy had surrendered to the inevitability of the former, but a true Child of Fortune could only seek to be the master of the latter and follow that Yellow Brick Road toward self-made dawn which had thusfar taken our species from the trees to the stars.

I found myself in that moment fingering my sash of Cloth of Many Colors. I found myself remembering the Moussa who had won it, and the Sunshine who had worn it proudly when she finally dared to stand up and spiel in the Luzplatz. I remembered he who had given it to me and named me a true Gypsy Joker, and how I had successfully pursued him against all odds. I remembered the girl who had been expelled from the Yggdrasil without even the wit to find a toilet. I remembered how I had arrived in Great and incomprehensible Edoku to wander its chaotic reality in a befuddled daze.

There was only one thing for it. Only a massive expedition could hope to rescue Guy, and only I might lead it to the Perfumed Garden. If I surrendered to karma now, the Perfumed Garden would remain an invidious legend of nirvana.

I rose up. I adjusted my floatbelt to .1 g. I turned my back to the west in defiance of the way of the Bloomenkinder, vraiment, in defiance of the very Bloomenveldt itself, and fixed my eyes on that point on the eastern horizon from which the light of a new dawn must inevitably arise after even the darkest of nights.

No one, it was said, had ever returned to the worlds of men from the land of the Bloomenkinder.

I sprang off my leaf in a mighty bound toward whatever lay between me and the coastline. No one, I told myself grandly, has ever returned to the worlds of men from the land of the Bloomenkinder before.

***

I gave no thought to rest until the sun's disc sinking past the horizon had painted the sky with the gauzy rose and purple banners of oncoming night, and the first faint stars had begun to shine in the blackening blue above the rim of the eastern horizon.

Vraiment, my spirit had risen up from despair to the outskirts of hope as the golden afternoon wore on, for I had naturally fallen into the pattern I had adopted as a psychonaut in less perilous precincts to the east, or rather my will had succeeded in enforcing its mirror image.

There I had allowed the subtle currents of diluted psychotropic wine wafting through my nostrils to freely move my spirit and my body like a kite upon a gentle breeze. Here, where the pheromonic weather was a good deal stronger, did I apply the compass of the ascetic's code: tacking against any perfume which aroused my desire. When the promise of gustatory delight without measure drew me to the left, I made a wide swing to the right, and I fled from any lustful impulses like the perfect celibate monk. Thus did I avoid landing in precincts from which I might find myself lacking the will to depart.

So did sapience triumph over the biochemical imperatives of the Bloomenveldt, or so I told myself, for had I not turned the very power of the enemy into the servant of my own pathfinding?

Now, however, it was becoming night, and in the lonely blindness of the dark, with things unseen scrabbling and scurrying through the leaves and branches, and all the breezes reeking of sleep, I had a good deal less confidence in the power of the light of reason over the shadowy phantoms of the presentient cortex.

Certainement, I should have felt hunger with some keenness as I huddled on a leaf in the blackness watching the stars come out. Certainement, considering my peril and the night sounds of this most alien of forests whispering around me, fear should have robbed me of any rest. At the very least, my brain should have been aswirl with the memories of the day's events, and trepidations concerning the events of the morrow.

But in these environs, or so it would seem, the Bloomenveldt, after its own self-interested fashion, took care to assure that none of its charges stumbled to the forest floor in the middle of the night or failed to receive the measure of sleep that their metabolisms required. Uncounted thousands of flowers altered their daytime profusion of pheromonic imperatives to fill the entire Bloomenveldt with the peacefully leaden perfume of a single purpose.

Not hunger, not fear, mayhap not even outright terror, could have long kept any mammal awake in this overwhelming perfumed fog of sleep. Not even this sapient Child of Fortune alone with her thoughts could deprive herself of the Bloomenveldt's gift of deep and uninterrupted slumber.

***

When I awoke in the bleak early moments of sunrise, however, it was an entirely different matter. The sun peeked up through a cool gray mist dimming the greens and floral hues of the Bloomenveldt to ghostly pastels. Certainement, I had not been awoken by either the bright light of dawn or the natural clock of my own metabolism at this repulsive hour. No, it was a ravenous hunger which had been sufficiently powerful to break my sleep; my stomach seemed plastered like an aching membrane against my backbone, my head ached with hollow emptiness, and my consciousness could contain naught but the thought of luscious fruits.

The faint odors of which seemed as pervasive as the mist slowly beginning to bum off the Bloomenveldt. The trace aromas of fruits I had never seen evoked sharp memories of wonderful savors I had never tasted.

Since it had been nearly a day since I had last eaten, my hunger of the morning seemed far less unnatural than the absence of same last night. Yet the phantom flavors teasing across my palate on the breeze alerted me to the fact that there were external agencies at work. No doubt, just as the nighttime perfumes masked all hunger behind an impenetrable urge to sleep, so had the conclusion of these secretions with the dawn abruptly allowed it to surface redoubled by time.

But while it may have been the flowers that were filling my nostrils and caressing my tastebuds with promises of gustatory delight, my ringing head and aching stomach were clear evidence of true famishment on a metabolic level. Which is to say that no matter what powerful psychotropics the food behind such pheromonic blandishments was likely to contain, not even the mightiest ascetic heroism was going to prevent me from having to eat sooner or later.

Still, mayhap I could apply the same contrarian strategy which had served me well thusfar and avoid eating any fruits to which I was drawn by the perfumes and consume only those which the Bloomenveldt appeared to have laid out for other species. By so doing, I might at least avoid ingesting psychotropics evolved by the cunning of the flowers as specific snares for our own.

Thus resolved, I drank water from the abundant supplies thereof condensed in the hollows of nearby leaves, and then set off to the east in a series of short, high, hanging hops, ignoring all blandishments of aromas by act of will, and seeking to spy out an untenanted flower by vision alone.

As chance would have it, I had not proceeded in this manner for very long when I spotted a small grove of flowers of several different species not two hundred meters to the north. Not only were no human figures in evidence, there seemed to be no aromas leading my backbrain by the nose toward it.

What 1 saw when I arrived at this grove's margin, however, was a good deal less than an appetizing spectacle. Half a dozen species of flowers had arranged themselves in widely separated stands of two or three blooms, and with the exception of those of one species with which I was all too familiar, these all seemed to be somewhat immature specimens, nor was any fruit in evidence, as if the Perfumed Garden had recently sent out a colonial expedition which had not yet matured to the point of attracting its own Bloomenkinder.

But when I approached one of the stands of rainbow puffballs which seemed to be the only fully mature flowers in the garden, I saw that this surmise was both florally correct and humanly wrong in a peculiarly horrifying manner.

For here in the deep Bloomenveldt with no adult humans anywhere in evidence, clusters of human infants were nevertheless hanging from the vegetative teats of the flowers. Somehow, the flowers had either chemically commanded the mothers thereof to deposit their offspring in this venue, or worse still, exuded pheromones which drew hundreds of toddlers wriggling across the Bloomenveldt to improve the species by utterly ruthless natural selection.

Either way, this juvenile offspring of the Perfumed Garden was growing its own first generation of human pollinators.

While the gorge and outrage that such a sight called forth would be difficult to exaggerate, some logical circuits in my mind remained capable of making a cold calculation. No doubt the reason that this grove did not exude perfumes attractive to adult humans was that it had not matured to the point where it was ready to serve as a proper host to same. Since the sap secreted by the teats was clearly sufficient to sustain these infant Bloomenkinder in robust health, might it not do the same for me? And since the perfumes of the grove lacked molecules with puissant effect upon the adult human metabolism, might not the milk thereof be equally lacking in danger?

Putting aside all esthetic considerations, gustatory or social, I sought out a stem as free from babes as possible, lay down on the leaf before it, applied my mouth to one of the pinkly rounded breasts thereof, and gave suck to the hard red teat.

A thick, tepid, somewhat sweet syrup oozed into my mouth, its simple savor not designed to appeal to mature tastebuds, so that the esthetic experience was like drinking liquified and sweetened fressen. But as the syrup slowly poured down my throat, my stomach welcomed it as the plants of a desert welcome rain after a long parching drought, and the very cells of my body seemed to sigh in relief. Avidly, I sucked at the floral teat with unrestrained enthusiasm, until I had established a steady flow with much unseemly smacking and gurgling.

I could not have been at it for more than a few minutes when, in almost less time than it takes to tell, a bubble of nausea suddenly exploded in my gut, a spasm of utter rejection that had my whole body trembling, and a series of retches wracked me down to the limbs.

I spat out the teat and managed to roll up onto my haunches clutching my stomach as I vomited charge after charge of thick green liquid over the edge of the leaf.

Fortunately, rather than expiring in a series of dry heaves, the episode ended as soon as the last of the sap had been expelled, and aside from a certain soreness of the ribs and a painful sharpening of the demanding emptiness in my stomach, I was no more the worse for wear, as if the flower had merely sought to provide a harmless lesson.

Vraiment, that lesson had been well taught! What the Bloomenveldt provided for the young of our species was crafted to be intolerable to the adult metabolism thereof.

Having no further business to conduct in this noxious nursery, I fled the vecino thereof in a random series of short leaps, thinking for the moment of nothing more than putting it well behind me. It did not take long, however, for my ravenous hunger to reassert its demands, and for the perfumed promises of succulence to clutch at my backbrain with ever greater strength.

I knew full well that if I did not find safer fare soon, I would reach a state where I could no longer resist these siren calls to ease my famishment at the first Bloomenkinder larder my nose could find. With my remaining will, I resolved therefore to seek out lone flowers whose perfumes promised nothing and sample the fruits thereof, even though my confidence in this strategy was now severely eroded.

Nor, alas, did my pessimism prove unfounded. Discovering flowers indifferent to the attendance of my species was easy enough, but none of the fare offered up thereby was at all palatable.

Some of these fruits repelled by the perfect loathsomeness of their flavors: there were fruits whose taste filled the backbrain with a rank fecal odor, fruits that tasted like ancient overripe cheese, fruits which to my palate seemed redolent of urine. But the greater part of the fruits I forced myself to sample caused such powerful retching the moment their pulp touched my mouth that I was spared the full horror of the flavors thereof.

The message could not have been clearer had it been graven in monumental letters of stone. In these deep precincts, at any rate, humans could eat only the fruits to which the perfumes drew them, and these, no doubt, were therefore liberally laced with molecules designed to perfect their behavior as pollinators. It was a closed circle which seemed to allow no space whatsoever for sapient will.

***

In utter despair leavened only by an equally powerful outrage, with my stomach pounding in agony, my ears ringing with faintness, my legs beginning to go wobbly, and my nostrils constantly assailed by promises of swift and delicious surcease from this entirely self-inflicted torture, I set off for want of any other course of action into the warming blaze of the rising sun which had long since burned away the mist of morning.

Even then I must have known that I was only postponing the inevitable. For as the day wore on past noon, the pains in my stomach grew stronger, I was becoming too weak with hunger to even completely control the trajectories of my evermore feeble leaps, I was becoming increasingly dizzy to the point where consciousness was beginning to wink on and off, and, contrawise, the smells of delicious fruits mine for the taking had come to dominate my sensorium to the point where there was room in my mind for no other thought save the by-now-equally-tropistic self- command to follow the direction of sunrise which I had programmed what was left of my sapient spirit to follow.

But inevitably my body weakened to the point where it could no longer maintain a sapient spirit to follow its own song, and the perfumed breath of the flowers seized the remnants of my consciousness, which is to say that, with a great sigh of animal relief, I finally allowed myself to follow the summons to the nearest floral banquet.

There were some score flowers in this garden: lavender bells, yellow cups filled with nectar, pink flowers of passion, crumbly black cones of pollen circled by small white aprons of petals, mayhap other types as well, for my sensorium was skewed entirely away from sight and sound into a sphere where smell and taste merged to dominate my perceptions and within which hunger and the glorious satisfaction of same had become the sum total of my being.

I buried my face in the thick clear nectar pooling in the nearest of the yellow cups, unmindful of the two Bloomenkinder doing likewise beside me, and slobbered mouthful after mouthful down my throat, all but groaning in ecstasy.

For the smoky-sweet savor thereof was the perfect fulfillment of that which was promised by the aroma of sugar-glazed and crisply roasted meat which filled the nether reaches of my brain. As for the effect upon the famished cells of my body, this can only be likened to a minion sparkling pinpoints of gustatory orgasm.

When I had sucked up my fill, or rather, no doubt, when the pheromonic winds changed to fill my being with something like the odor of steaming chocolated cinnamon pastries fresh and redolent from the oven, I abandoned the nectar cup forthwith and quite literally without a conscious thought repaired straightaway to one of the great black mounds surrounded by white petals, where I immediately proceeded to stuff great handfuls of crumbly black pollen into my mouth, trembling with delight as I chewed the sticky and crunchy grains which savored of spiced nutmeats enrobed in velvety chocolate creme.

As well do I remember huge black berries that drew me with the aroma of fine brandy and tasted like minted wine, long red fruit redolent of jasmine and black mushrooms and savoring of fruits baked in meaty caramel.

I existed in a state of perfect bliss, for the sum total of my consciousness consisted of the tantalizing aromas of gustatory lust and the all-but-immediate orgasmic satisfaction thereof. As to how long this cycle of feasting endured, je ne sais pas, for certainement there was no sapience of a sufficient level of intellect present to count the minutes or hours, or even to encompass the very concept of time.

Nor did I pay the least heed to the Bloomenkinder in whose midst I dined, any more than they found an apparition such as myself sufficient to arouse table talk or eye contact or the slightest momentary diversion from the single-minded task of fressing. We walked from flower to flower and we ate. That was the sum total of our blissful existence.

Until, that is, a flower decreed otherwise.

I was hunkered on the soft fat petals of a great open pink blossom devouring large blue ovoids with several other mindless Bloomenkinder, when the winds of desire changed and with them the very nature of my being.

A blood-warm rosy perfume seemed to pour straight through me, dissolving my gustatory obsession the moment the first molecules thereof had soaked into the volitional cells of my backbrain, and all at once, smell, taste, and the pleasures of gluttony faded away to faint abstractions which could scarcely be said to exist.

For now it was touch and feeling that had become the sensory crowns of my creation. My skin had become an interface of palpitating nerve-ends crying out to be caressed, my mouth ached to fill itself with warm velvety flesh, and my loins burned with a lustful fire that had the immediacy and urgent impact of completely dehydrated thirst.

Nor was I alone in my sudden transmutation into a fiery creature of polymorphous lust. In less time than it would have taken to consider had sapient consideration entered into the matter at all, I had thrown myself on the nearest male body, ripped the necessary entree in the fabric of my trousers, and impaled the circle of fire of my yoni upon a lingam.

Nor did this at all suffice. Sucking and grasping, I wrapped my lips around the first phallic fruit I could seize up and drew it in to the root. Vraiment, my nether orifice was forthwith breached as well to my avid satisfaction, and I felt mouths at my nipples, hands and tongues at the small of my back and thighs, and then naught existed but a carmine fog of all my senses, and an endless series of multiplex cusps that went on and on and on.

Vraiment, more than propriety or shame prevents me from detailing the variety, scope, and duration of the ever-changing interlocked tantric figures in which I took an actively enthusiastic part, for the truth of it is that I was lost in a timeless and mindless realm wherein even the distinction between the flesh and the gratification thereof had been completely annihilated.

Suffice it to say that this state endured and then ended with the same suddenness with which it had begun. A cool pheromonic wind blew through me, like the cold, crystalline clarity of the void between the stars, and all at once sensation evaporated from the surface of my skin and the kundalinic crannies of my erotic spaces, and all that existed was a disembodied spirit that sought the complete and blissful nothingness thereof.

This spirit found itself being transported atop a numb fleshly automaton and deposited supinely on a leaf beneath a lavender bell, where four other Bloomenkinder already lay staring motionlessly up into the clear cloudless sky.

Time stopped. Sound ceased. Smell, taste, and kinesthetic awareness of the contours of my own body faded away. I was naught but an empty volume of space-time gazing up fixedly into an equally perfect and featureless cerulean mandala of tranquil nullity. I was one with the Bloomenveldt. I had achieved the mindless perfection of the clear blue void.

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